Just Cause 4’s new weather systems began as a single, small idea – adding visible wind currents to the world, allowing perennial hero Rico’s parachute-wingsuit-parachute traversal to become even more useful. But, according to game director Francesco Antolini, once that was added the team then started thinking about how it could be pushed further.

Could wind be added at ground level, and affect NPCs? What about tip over cars? What if the wind was part of a sandstorm? Or a lightning storm, to add more jeopardy? Naturally, this process eventually led to “what if there was a gigantic, man-made tornado that existed somewhere on the game’s map at all times and could suck up almost every object it passed by?” And so the team made, well, all of that.

It’s the most ‘Just Cause-y' game design anecdote I could imagine, and it perfectly sums up what Avalanche seems to be aiming to achieve in its fourth tilt at the series: take something we already have, tweak it to make it better, and then go completely insane for no reason other than “it’s fun”.

Exit Theatre Mode

Having played the full game for around 8 hours, that philosophy is visible everywhere. One of Just Cause 3’s best upgrades was the ability to turn mines into rocket boosters – so Just Cause 4 gives you them almost immediately, lets you place 10 at once, and has you attach them with your grappling hook to allow for longer range mischief. Just Cause 2 worked around a metric of ‘Chaos’, which was a neat way of incentivising blowing almost everything up. Just Cause 4 brings that idea back, but now ties it more firmly to progression and unlocks, while increasing the number and variety of explosive objects to rupture, making almost any moment not spent trying to make something coloured red explode feel like a waste.

This thinking doesn’t just apply to Avalanche’s own games. Metal Gear Solid 5’s Fulton balloons were hugely popular, so Just Cause 4 nabs them, turns them into a grapple tether too, and makes them somehow more ridiculous (I’ve had little purer fun this year than floating unsuspecting enemies to 100 feet and then popping the balloons). There are, legitimately, too many proactive changes to name: every gun now has secondary fire, ‘completing’ any region unlocks new supply drops, and you can supply drop more items at once than ever, vehicles have new abilities, and destruction has been reworked to allow for objects to collapse, roll, and generally go boom in more interesting ways. Coming in from Just Cause 3, it’s remarkable how comprehensive that sweep of fun-focused design tweaks has been.

The only element at odds with all this is the story, which somehow seems more serious than ever, with Rico heading to the home of his near-constant nemesis, the Black Hand organization, and kicking off a full-blown war. Thankfully, the plot is both easily ignorable and allows for that war to take centre-stage. Rico’s no longer fighting alone; his one-time solo guerrilla efforts now help attract an army of freedom fighters to his cause, and overtaking the enormous map’s tens of regions is a case of helping that army sweep across Solís, literally moving the frontline of the war as you do.

The upshot is, as you might expect by this point, brilliantly over-the-top. The new frontlines you create are represented by interminable battles across rivers, bridges or whatever borders the two sides have chosen to fight across. Infantry and vehicles endlessly spawn to destroy each other, not only creating constant spectacle, but offering you opportunity to take your pick of the equipment. It’s a low bar, but it’s actually Just Cause’s most effective bit of storytelling so far – as the frontlines sweep across the world’s new biomes, from farmland, to desert, to rainforest, there’s a genuine sense that your actions have an effect on the world.

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That move across the island nation’s regions comes through familiar means. Generalised chaos helps you build the “squad reserves” currency you need to complete a region, but Just Cause 3’s Strikes - less formal missions revolving around destruction in an enemy outpost – return as a prerequisite of taking a region. Avalanche has strived to make these a little more varied, stirring escort missions, miniature puzzles, even stunt driving into the wash of explosions. Operations act as main story missions, bringing their own one-off absurdities with them, from grappling across a sky full of weather balloons to catch a blimp, to guiding the island’s tornado through an enemy outpost.

But, in my experience, it’s more or less expected that you’ll forget any of this is going on for huge swathes of time, because of the sheer possibility for idiocy. I left missions entirely because I couldn’t resist booting a pedestrian off a moped, used a Wind Gun to turn a truck trailer into a baseball bat for passers-by, and made every bit of wildlife I saw float away, just because. The grappling hook, and its extra options when tethering objects together, is the ultimate admission from Avalanche that it realises that the attraction for many players will will be in how much they can mess around.

The ability to switch between three different tether loadouts, made up of any combination of retractors, boosters and airlifters, would easily be an improvement on the last game in and of itself – but it goes deeper than that. Every loadout can also be modded to a ludicrously minute level. Balloons can be fragile, invulnerable, or explosive, and can float to a variety of different heights. Boosters can be altered to fly in the direction the camera’s facing, while retractors’ strengths can be changed, helping you do anything from gently turn over a flipped car to cannoning cargo helicopters into the ground. And yet, no matter how precise those granular options let you get with your plans, what you’ve planned for will often go completely wrong – which is somehow even better.

Exit Theatre Mode

As has been true of the entire series, Just Cause 4 likely won’t suit those who don’t approach the game with an inquisitive (or just horrible) mind. Rather than bring you emergent encounters, Solís is littered with convenient hubs for you to cause trouble – and that trouble will be as interesting as you make it. Walk into a base with an assault rifle and shoot some gas tanks and you might get some pretty explosions at best. But fire retracting grappling hooks to pull down towers, use the wind gun to turn shipping containers into battering rams, and then escape on a makeshift rocket? Well, now we’re getting somewhere.

Avalanche’s smartest move is in realising that experimentation, not prescriptive objectives, is what players actually want, and every positive change I’ve seen has been in service of that. Just as Avalanche turned simple wind simulation into an entire suite of extreme weather types, Just Cause 4 wants you to push your ideas as far as they can go, just because you can.

Joe Skrebels is IGN's UK News Editor, and he apologises for the creepy balloon-people sculptures he made. Follow him on Twitter.